Shirley Sotloff’s Plea

"I am Shirley Sotloff. My son, Steven, is in your hands," the mother of an American hostage said in a video released Wednesday. In it, she speaks directly to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. Steven Sotloff, a journalist, was abducted more than a year ago and was seen, last week, in the video in which James Foley, an American journalist, was beheaded: a masked man says that Sotloff is next on the group’s murder list. In her video, his mother, who, with his family, had until then kept his kidnapping quiet, begs for her son's life: "I want what every mother wants: to live to see her children's children. I plead with you to grant me this."

ISIS claims to be setting up a religiously ruled caliphate in the territory it controls, and Sotloff addresses Baghdadi as "caliph." She has, she said, studied Islam since her son's capture, and "learned that Islam teaches that no individual should be held responsible for the sins of others." This is an answer to the ISIS video, posted shortly after President Obama launched airstrikes aimed at the group, in which the masked man says, “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.” Shirley Sotloff says,

Steven has no control over the actions of the U.S. government. He's an innocent journalist.

I've always learned that you, the caliph, can grant amnesty. I ask you to please release my child. As a mother, I ask your justice to be merciful and not punish my son for matters he has no control over.

The Times, one of the outlets that got a copy of the video—it was broadcast on Al-Arabiya—focussed in its first piece on the rhetorical effect of the word "caliph," and speculates that Shirley Sotloff's use of it "is almost certainly the first time a non-Muslim has acknowledged his authority, a move that may prove controversial," and quotes someone at a think tank who said that he might do the same thing if his child were the captive but who also thought that, in the Times’ words, it "could help boost him”—al-Baghdadi—“in the eyes of others." This line of reasoning seems both unfair and misguided, for a few reasons. It is clear that Shirley Sotloff is making the video under great duress. She is trying to talk to a hostage taker who, in effect, is holding her child off a ledge—and, in a way, is holding her prisoner, too. If she thought that it would help to address him as Santa Claus, it wouldn't be right to judge her for it. Moreover, everyone who is watching this video knows it.

The video might, for that matter, have a different effect. It is deeply moving. There is a universal language to the pain she conveys, one that has nothing to do with words like "caliph." Others in the Muslim world are looking at ISIS and deciding what they think of it, and the statement of temporal authority that they are looking for is not likely to come from a mother in Florida. It seems possible, instead, that they would see a rejection of her plea as evidence of the group's lack of moral authority.

The language of the video, indeed, seems to reflect a hope that it will move not Baghdadi with flattery but a broader, perhaps particularly Sunni, audience to sympathy. "Steven is a journalist who travelled to the Middle East to cover the suffering of Muslims at the hands of tyrants," she says, and to spare him would be "to follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad." This may do nothing to save his life. As Lawrence Wright has written, unhinged violence is part of ISIS’s sense of itself; the group is beyond appeals to pity. But if one is speaking in terms of how Sotloff’s story positions ISIS, it seems wrong to dismiss the possible effect on the constituencies that ISIS will ultimately need, including some ordinary Sunnis who have their own views of those tyrants or donors in the Gulf states—or, for that matter, Western recruits. (On Tuesday, there was news that an American named Douglas McAuthur McCain had died in Syria, apparently on the side of jihadis, and the British may be close to identifying the masked man in the Foley video as one of their citizens.)

This may, again, be wishful: in Syria, with almost two hundred thousand people killed and millions made refugees in its civil war, people may not have much time for one American mother. But revulsion at violence is not something on which anyone has a monopoly.

The Foley video is almost unbearable to watch—for those who loved both men; for each of their mothers, who remember when they were children; as well as for the families of the other Americans who are being held by ISIS. Foley's mother is mourning him now, along with his father and four siblings; Sotloff's mother is trying to get him home, and one can only hope desperately that she does. But it is hard to watch for strangers, too, including those in distant places. "We've not seen Steven for over a year, and we miss him very much," Shirley Sotloff says. "We want to see him home safe and sound and to hug him."

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a New Yorker staff writer, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.